The middle of the story
by Bakahoney
Summary: This story begins in the middle of the story. [Warning: this story contains homoaffective relationships and explicit content. The original version was writen in brazilian portuguese]
1. The middle

This story begins in the middle.

Or in the end of a dream which he wouldn't remember, but tried to reach once or twice. Some subtleties escape between our fingers. He would let some more of them escape yet.

But waking up is the hardest part.

This story begins in the middle of a sickening and delirious awakening that occurred without greater problems. From the good signs life gives us sometimes, he felt his fingers because they ached, and they ached because they were there. The rest of his pains slid simply.

He woke up because he dreamt for too long, and that for sure wasn't good for health. With eyes shut, he smelled rain and shortbread. With eyes open, milk, honey, grapes and a violent daylight.

And then there was the lady, a nurse as restless as an ant, nice legs and a little too old, and she gave him water for his dry throat and slices of fresh bread and coffee for his empty guts. That smelled really good, and it was a shame that he threw up on the sheets. She trembled here and there and in and out of the room until she got someone to clean that shit up.

They tried it again later, with a bowl of dirty water that tasted like chicken in place of the bread and the coffee. That settled his stomach down. She was a good and old nurse who didn't give a flying fuck about him, and he liked her. When she was gone without a word, he thought he would like to have a cigarette with her and praise her legs.

By then he knew he had a problem in his hands, and he would have to solve it, but there's no way you can solve a problem without a smoke and a pair of trousers, so he just lay there for a while longer.

It was about lunch time when his first visitor came in. The old man brought him a plate of mashed something and some aspirins, but he wasn't interested. There was a tree squeaking and bowing outside the window, in the rain, and he asked the old man a sip of water.

"How do you feel?"

Whatever was that _thing_ he was chewing, that also tasted like chicken.

"How long have I slept?"

The old man smiled and, from a distance, he seemed flaky and yellow.

"Two weeks."

Yeah, long enough to avoid coffee for a while.

The old man took him to the closed window and gave him something to smoke, which was pointless, but caressed everyone's consciences.

"How the hell did this happen, Sinbad? We were really worried."

Ah.

"Well."

He started solving that problem, once it wasn't like someone seemed inclined to get him a pair of trousers. He asked himself who he would have to pay to get back those grapes and shortbreads he saw that morning. Or anything that didn't taste like a flying something.

"Actually, I was wondering if I would have to ask you to tell me my name"

He smiled, sure that he wouldn't feel sleepy so soon.

This story begins in the middle of the story.


	2. The day Sinbad woke up

**Balbadd Disctrict – 12:40 PM – The day Sinbad woke up**

The day Sinbad woke up was a summer day that left behind a hot and humid stain as it crawled to its end. A furious and short rain would fall down three times that day, and then a heavy haze would engulf them in the breaks.

Sweaty and greasy, he wondered who could arrange him a shower, but the old man kept staring at him as if he was a damned dancing cockroach.

"Come again?"

He was an old gray-haired man who seemed able to carry a horse on his back. Firm hands left his white shirt, and the shoes in the end of his pinstripe pants were shiny as if someone had just licked them. He had his white hair in a low ponytail, and a fucking goat patch falling from his ceiling-pointed chin.

He smelled like sandalwood and destruction.

"You called me Sinbad. That's my name, right?"

"You don't know?"

 _One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams…_

"I can relate to it."

"But you can't remember."

 _…he discovered that in bed…_

"Look, we can do it quickly or you can take your time and go through the stages of acceptance. It's not like I've got some appointment today, anyway."

 _…he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug._

The old man left the room wordless. When he came back, he brought a young blue haired lady with a pair of ridiculously huge twin peaks. A reminder from God so they could remember He really was everywhere.

"Yamuraiha, we get a problem."

She was solid as a cork, a complex of nice breasts, nice ass and freaky blue eyes that snapped out of place when caught him. Under the lab coat, she swung for two seconds.

"He's awake."

She was also some kind of genius.

"He doesn't remember anything."

"So it seems."

She undressed him the way one plucks a duck and he got a boner which no one cared about. Stethoscopes and touches and tests and "there's nothing physically apparent to justify this", the girl said. The old man told her to take a better look, she told him to go fuck himself with a pigeon.

"There's a chance the cause is not physical", she said in no surprise, clicking her tongue behind her lips, "I mean, they hit his head pretty hard, but not to this extent. And the bump is already gone. We have to consider the possibility of a non-physical trauma", she touched the back of Sinbad's head and he thought about slapping her, sick.

Like this, so close, those blue eyes rang broken bells in his mind.  
"Is this why he just vanished?"

"I'd say so. There are no records about it, besides lots of gossip, but it seems Chances are really untraceable without a complete identity. This includes memories."

They ignored Sinbad's thinking existence, and he ignored himself as well, and that seemed ok for all of them. The old man lit his own cigarette close to the window and the girl asked him who else knew about all that.

"That he's awake? The Council does, and the big guy outside probably does too. He senses this kind of stuff. The nurse also came this morning, so the staff may know something", the old man dropped his ashes on the floor, the girl called him disgusting.

"Don't tell anyone else. You know, this can be good for a while…"  
She smelled like mellow guavas in the summer, and Sinbad really really needed that shower.

"No more than a few days. Maybe this could buy us some time, but without him we're an easy target. They won't forget to finish us."

"They will come for us, with or without him."

"But with him there's a chance."

When silence came, both of them looked at Sinbad. Existent, naked, smelly, horny and hungry Sinbad.

"Oh for fuck's sake, you don't even get me a shower or a tooth brush, can't you at least keep pretending I'm not here while I get my dick down?"

"Yamuraiha, how long do you need to heal him?" the old man finished his cigarette.

"One month."

"I'll talk to the Council."

She wrote something in the palm of her hand, and for the first time the old man touched Sinbad's head (like he was something broken). That hurt like needles in his scalp, and when Sinbad looked at the man again, a name rolled from the back of the tongue to the teeth.

"Rashid?"

 _Snap._

A word and a feeling of peace and war glowed behind his eyes. Rashid took him by the shoulders, and Sinbad sit better to feel lonely and empty.

"Sinbad. Sinbad, answer me. _For Christ's sake_ , Sinbad, don't you dare fainting on me now. Sinbad, who am I?"

Sometimes, you try not to hope for anything. These times, I may tell you, you've already failed. Outside the window, the rain was gone, but the tree didn't make it.

"You are the hand. I am the sword" was the automatic answer.

The girl took a step back, because you never see well when you're too close. She tried:

"Sinbad, did you remember something?"

Sinbad looked like he'd just kicked a thousand seal cubs.

"I'm sorry. It's more like a feeling. Flashes and feelings. I mean… Rashid. I know who Rashid is for me, I think. This idea feels right. It fits."

"Well", she came closer, and the smell of guavas mixed well with sandalwood, "that's your emotional memory working. Good thing you kept that. We'll work on it. Who is Rashid for you?"

" _God_ ", the old man was halfway to the door, "you managed to get even more frustrating than you've always been. That's something" when Rashid left, Yamuraiha opened the window, pink ears and pale hands and bizarre blue eyes twitching.

"He's just worried about you, you know."

"It feels like Rashid is something like a father to me", he was right. She dressed him and said he stank of vomit. "You don't think I've got a non-physical trauma."

 _Shit_ you should try not to eat anything solid for a few more days would you, she said.

The nurse would come to talk to him and give him a shower and shave him, she said.  
She would also send some medicine be careful, she said.

Aren't you scared, she said.

Then she left.

The day Sinbad woke up was a summer day during which a furious and short rain would fall down three times. There were still two times left.

"To death."

 **Balbadd District – About 5 PM – The day Sinbad woke up**

The second rain on that day came in late afternoon, during an extraordinary Council's meeting. Yamuraiha waited for him at the abandoned East Gate of the disctrict, close to her home and far from Rashid's house and the Guard's barracks. In the pouring rain, she felt under her feet the rests of the people that died there two weeks earlier, and the people that died before. People would still die there.

The East Gate had an interesting story, which she alone could tell you backwards. It was the first of Balbadd district's four Gates, built about ten years before that day and fifty years after the Rebel insurgence. It was also the first destroyed one, followed by the West Gate. As the first Gate, and intending to be the only one, it was incredibly huge, rustic and awful. _An amazing piece of giant shit in the middle of nowhere, out of Central City's borders_. It was the original entrance to the Rebel's district, former name of Balbadd, but didn't resist the first attack from Central City's Army. Most of it fell apart during the attack and, huge as the Gate was, everyone who took shelter under it died crushed by giant iron pieces. Since then, that became a kind of doomed place, and no one who got there when the district was under attack survived, including two weeks before that day. After the West Gate fell, and once the South one was just the entrance to the District's Command Complex (which meant: Rashid's house and the Council's central office), the new entrance to Balbadd District became the North Gate.

Not surprisingly, people avoided the East Gate. So there she was, waiting for him.  
But he was always late. She was wet to her bones and he was late. She was an imbecile and he was a bastard that took five more minutes to get there, soaked, hooded and dirty.

"Another house collapsed close to the West Gate. I'm sorry", they went to a covered spot of the remains of the Gate. He had brick powder on is face and bloody hands and light sad green eyes that made her want to scream. "What made the pretty doctor leave her old lover's house in a day like this?"

"Sharrkham", the sound of the rain made her unsure if she said his name or cleared her throat, "Sinbad woke up" she took her lab coat from her bag and rubbed his face, "I don't know what you're doing, but you better have a damn good reason, 'cause I'm lying to save your ass."

"An amazing ass, by the way", he was tanned as a date palm, and dismissed her hand the way one catches butterflies. He caught that one. "I'll need to make a call", but his bloody fingers left a purple trail in her tangled messy blue hair. "You didn't need to come."

"The only other person who could tell you that was Masrur and _god_ I don't even _know_ if he can really articulate one full sentence", she left his arms and pulled back her hood. "I asked Rashid for one month, but Yunan has already volunteered to help me on healing Sinbad."

"Yeah, yeah. Your old man always gives you what you want, right?", a thunder echoed from far away and she told him to drop that crap. A drenched incredibly ugly cat curled her legs. He grabbed her face, she grabbed her gun.

"Whatever, Sharrkham. I hope you know what you're doing.", but his bloody fingers left a red stain on her cheeks. Her hands were a nasty mess of pen ink and gunpowder.

"I do."

She didn't move when he touched her lips with his hands, leaning to brush their lips together. Just _brush_. His bloody fingers left a crimson dot on her mouth.

"Anyway, I got you one month. Take care", she left in the rain, and the stray ugly cat stayed with him, and maybe he should eat it or give it a name. The rain took away every mark he left on her.

She always left.

 **Central City – About 9 PM – The day Sinbad woke up**

He got beaten up like a bitch.

He did so everyday in the last two weeks. They left him with a sliced open belly, hanging naked and blindfolded on hooks by his arms and legs so his guts wouldn't fall off and, _Christ_ , that didn't hurt so bad, probably because he was dying.  
Well, he couldn't blame anyone but himself for getting too soft, although that was a little ridiculous. At least hanging like that avoided the rats. Rats gnaw your fingers while you sleep, the bastards. So do cockroaches (and maybe also beetles). He was okay with that but _what the heck_ he didn't know one could bleed that much while still awake.

It wasn't like he could do much but stay conscious and try not to choke on his own blood, so he just listened. He heard the rain ease outside. He heard the guards. The cell he was in was maybe a 4m² room with two guards on the door on his back, and about seven other guards on several other doors on the way out. Common locks. Electric alarm.

That was just too easy. That was also a test, of course.

Alright, so there he was struggling for his life and shit when he heard all those doors outside opening and closing and he literally smelled like something rotten. He heard familiar steps _toc toc toc toc_ and a blow of fresh air came in when they opened the cell's door. That made him more alert and that _hurt like damn_.  
Then they closed the door.

Under the smell of intestines and blood, he wasn't alone anymore.

"You look disgusting, Ja'far", the Central City's Army Marshal had nice voice and a good point. "I heard you did rejoin them. I'd never heard about them accepting someone back. Aren't you really a piece of something?"

Fuck that. You know, Ja'far was a little busy trying not to die there and didn't feel like talking. But Marshal Kouen should try it and slice his ass open so they could talk about how refreshing that felt and be friends.

"Well, but it still looks like they don't forget old debits, right? I must admit, that's pretty creative", Kouen pulled Ja'far so he would swing on the hooks like a gross human organs pendulum. "I also heard that if you manage to overcome your punishment and survive two more days like this, you'll become my personal guard."

Ja'far squeaked like a smashed bird and tried not to suffocate on the blood on his mouth. The holes for the hooks on his hands and feet enlarged on that move and that wouldn't be good if it hit a nerve.

By the way _why the fuck_ was he naked?

"You've got a mission, I presume."

There was no rain outside anymore, he could tell. Too aware of himself and in three types of agony, he thought about flowers and, yeah, the last years had really made him soft as a kitten. White lilies were funeral flowers. When Kouen caressed his hair, Ja'far was screaming as a squirrel in a waste grinder, until that broke the rests of a rib.

Kouen smelled like white lilies and burning wood.

"I hope we keep professional on that matter."

Kouen's steps sounded backing off to the door. Then there was a silence that climbed to his spine like a rat. _God damn it he hated rats_.

"I almost forgot why I came here. General Koumei got a call."

He heard the door opening. He heard the door closing. Then there he was again. Alone and trying to keep his life on his guts. Hell, it couldn't be that difficult to keep a muscle squeezing itself.

…

Shit that was _hard_. His lips curved in a wild combat as he felt he was passing out.

Yes, he was struggling for his life and shit.

And yes, he was sucking on that.

Anyway, he was ready for his fight and for his fate.

 **Balbadd – Maybe 1 AM – The day after Sinbad woke up**

The third rain on that day began about 11 PM and crawled itself to the day after.  
You wouldn't be surprised if I told you Sinbad had insomnia.

Sleeping Beauty was busy getting complex and deep on his amnesiac issues and didn't feel like sleeping any more. He was also (and still) hungry. He got bathed and shaved and was alarmingly skinny, but Mrs. Nice Legs wasn't really open to discuss the matter of his self-concept.

It was about 1 AM when his fourth visitor (this calculation included Mrs. Nice Breasts) walked in, bringing a smile and a picnic hamper. He was a man, tall and blonde and white and skinny and so nice that Sinbad wouldn't be surprised if the guy was a cheerleader.

"It's funny the way your mind chooses what you remember, don't you think?", the gorgeous fellow opened the hamper and there was blue cheese, fresh bread, olives, tomatoes and a fat beautiful piece of raw bacon, and it felt like he slapped good food into Sinbad's non-eating-solids face. "The name's Yunan. I'll take you to the kitchen and answer your questions."

Well, that was really welcome.

The kitchen was empty and big and white and _clean_. There wasn't a sound in the house, so Sinbad took the olives jar and sit on the wooden only table there, and asked the pretty dude about Rashid. Was the old man his father?

"Oh, that", the blonde cutie got a knife and murdered some big tomatoes. "No. Taste the cheese. Don't worry about throwing up, it happens in the best families and I won't tell Yamuraiha", he couldn't find the garlic cloves. "He just found you and the big guy when you were kids and gave you a home. Or something like that. Then you grow up, worship the man, become his right arm on the fight against Al Thamen's forces of evil blablabla."

"The big guy?"

"Yeah, Masrur. You must have seen him, he's like your shadow. Big dude, red hair, huge muscles, nice butt, no words. "

"Hm. No."

"Well, that's strange. Yeah, now that you mention, have any of your friends been there to see you?" Yunan was setting fire to a pan and that for sure wasn't right. "Oh, forget it. First things first: have you noticed your Choice is on stand by?"

"Choice?"

"Oh God." Sweet-boy dropped his pan and messed up the floor. The mashed tomatoes looked like a crime scene. "You really have no clue, do you? You know, I'm really curious about why is your mind blocking _that_." He grabbed that stuff back to the pan and started cooking that again. That was really wrong. "It's like I'm talking to the door. Anyway, okay. First things first again: have you any idea of what is going on here?"

He didn't wait for an answer, once he burnt what was in the pan. _Thank god_.

"I tell you: it's civil war, Sinbad. You know, bombs, guns, people dying, no pizza. Would you look for the butter, please?", no. "You're now in Balbadd District, or the Rebel's District, or _the middle of nowhere_ , ruled by Rashid and the Council. It opposes Al Thamen's government on Central City."

Yunan told him that when Rashid took him and Masrur, they were orphan, homeless and stinky kids. That was ten years after Rashid and Yunan create a rebel insurgence on Central City. During those years, they looked for Sinbad.

"Looked for me?"

Yeah.

"But hold your horses. This is really gonna be a long night, right, Sinbad?"

They went silent for a while, 'cause the smell in the kitchen was unbearable.

"Yunan. Just tell me that now: who did this to me?"

Fairy boy unfold a flaccid and miserable smile. There was no butter.

"A former member of Al-Thamen that everyone thought were dead. I heard he managed to rejoin then, after all. The name is Ja'far."

Sinbad threw up the cheese, of course.


	3. The beginning of the story

In the middle of the story, Yunan will be on his fours on the kitchen floor, cleaning Sinbad's vomit and telling him the basic (fairy-boy will be pretty confident about the return of Sinbad's memory) about the war, and Choices and Chances.

Once he'll be pretty busy doing that, I'll do his job here.

This is what Yunan will tell Sinbad:

This story begins when humanity went crazy. Although that could mean anytime in humanity's history, we're talking specifically about the moment Al Thamen, an organization compromised with – yesss – global domination and stuff, destroyed about half of the world, and reorganized the rest of it under its government. Not surprisingly, what remained of the world also started destroying itself, because that's what people do.

So there was humanity dancing in the curve of its own end, when the Universe (or something like it, no one knows for sure) saw all that crap and tried to give our world one last chance. Or Chances.

"Ok, what the heck is that", you may ask, tired of this shit.

It's a basic matter of quantum physics. But first answer this question: how many possibilities there are in a moment? Which combination of possibilities, inside the millions of billions of combinations that there are (and there were since the Beginning), brought us exactly here and now? Thinking about that, we must admit that _here and now_ are fragile miracles, random combinations of possibilities that, being any other ones, would take us to any other _here and now_.  
The important part is the understatement that possibilities, once become true, condition somehow future ones. Today, for example: I chose staying at home. There is the chance that I'll be struck by a lightning. In case that happens, I'll be struck by the lightning **inside** my house. Not outside, 'cause that's not where I am. That logic goes on and on. Obviously.

It gets less obvious, however, when you look at the exceptions. Until now, I may say I'm talking about **fate** as a combination of possibilities that condition the future ones into the point future itself becomes something almost predictable. _Math, basically_. As you know, any little choice I make will change my life's final result, and yours, and probably someone else's. That happens everyday, and that's how life usually works: your choices are logically bound to each other.  
What doesn't happen everyday is having a **Choice**. This is the gift given by the Universe to humanity.

A **Choice** is something few people have. Those who have it can make an only wish for a price, and this wish is out of the possibilities that were left by the previous choices ever made. What I mean is: a Choice is a step back in reality. Thus, the limits of fate get wider, and future may become something absolutely different from what Math would foresee. Illogical.

When one has a Choice, this person is a Chance.

Chances can feel each other's existence and presence, for some reason. Once the Choice is made, the person that owned it ceases being a Chance, but never stops feeling other's Choices. That's a way to track one another. That's also important for this story.

Knowing that Chances were a way to change future and fate, of course Al-Thamen got interested. They quickly began tracking and collecting Chances around the world (which weren't many), and three generations of these people were caged, used, neutralized or killed in Central City, the government base, by the Army, under Al-Thamen's orders, so the organization would keep ruling the world.

But they couldn't get Yunan.

Yunan was the only Chance that managed to run away and make his Choice freely. His wish was the birth of someone powerful enough to change the world. Not original, but maybe effective.

But Choices have a price, and even Yunan's life wouldn't be enough as a payment for this wish. _So he paid what he could pay and got what he could get_ , and his wish got partly granted in the form of a lost child, which he would pass the next ten years of his life looking for. Joining Rashid, the leader of a little group of rebels, they started gathering refugees and exiled people, giving birth to the Rebel insurgence.

Well, they started a war.

Ten years later, when Yunan and Rashid found Sinbad and Masrur, two lost kids in the remains of Parthevia, a ghost city decimated by illness, they took five more years to establish the Rebel District, Balbadd, out of Central City's borders.

But Sinbad was a problem.

Born as Yunan's incomplete wish, he had a Choice, a really powerful one, although he wasn't really a Chance. He was more like an enormous anomaly created by other Chance, unstable and split in half, feared by both Balbadd and Al-Thamen. He had to be trained to keep this unknown power under control. That worked. That also sucked.  
The fourth generation of Chances, however, granted the world with only two of them: Ren Kouen, the Marshall of Central City's Army, and Judal, a freaky kid that flipped his shit just too young, both kept under Al-Thamen's guard.

While Sinbad The Anomaly was being guarded by Balbadd, years passed, the Rebel District attacked and got attacked several times and things went smoothly like in any civil war.  
But then came the day we may call "almost the middle of the story" for now.

In almost the middle of the story, Al-Thamen attacked Balbadd with an elite squad, and Sinbad got severely injured by an invader. Not Al-Thamen's, not Balbadd's. An invader. He then lost his memory.

Well, these things happen. But it put some more irons in the fire. It happens that there was an urban legend that said that your Choice depended on your nature as a person. Once your nature as a person depends on your sense of yourself, losing something really important would make a Choice untraceable. It would stay on stand-by, waiting for the anomaly on the Chance's nature to be over. A memory is a really important part on a person's nature. At least it seems like that, once Sinbad's Choice was untraceable and, for the rest of the world, it was like he was dead.

Then Sinbad woke up, in the middle of the story.

Though that's a beautiful outrageously boring narrative, it doesn't tell us much. Yunan won't tell Sinbad everything, because he will be busy cleaning cheese vomit from the floor.  
He also won't really know everything there is to tell. It means I'll assume for now and fill in the blanks for us all.

So.

This is what Yunan won't be able to tell Sinbad.

This is also the beginning of the story.

 **Parthevia – The middle of the afternoon – Fifty years before Sinbad woke up**

Mommy wouldn't stop crying and whining in the middle of the night. Sinbad always went to her grave to ask her to stop, but she never did.

He didn't know much about anything, given that he was ten years old and pretty much an idiot even for this age. But he could tell you in six fingers the things he knew for sure.  
The first thing he knew was that there was not much left to see in that town. There's not much to be seen about dead people, and listening to the buzz of the flies for too long turns one into a weird kid. Probably that's what happened to the mute boy that he found close to the yard where mom was buried one moth ago, a naked two years old covered in blood and stinking as hell. He took the boy in.

One afternoon, however, when mommy started screaming in his head, he got a backpack full of toys, apples and a flashlight. His plan ended up in finding the end of the city, and they were leaving.

The only thing that wasn't dead in that whole shitty city was the cats. Those fat motherfuckers were the size of dogs, after feeding on so many corpses, and it was pretty clear that eventually they would start eating living people too. On empty streets under the sun of about 3 PM, avoiding mutant cats and boiling hot dead bodies wasn't exactly the childhood dream, but he could work with that.

The second thing he knew was that mom wasn't resting in peace, because there's no peace about dying soaked in her own piss. But she was an adult and that was her problem. Adults always have those kinds of idiot issues, so you just have to leave them do the crap they think they should, even knowing that grownups never do the right thing.

The crap she did was staying there, even though everyone was falling sick. There's nowhere else to go, she said. Well, that doesn't mean much when you're not even alive to _go_ somewhere. She was dumb as a door and he missed her.

The days passed. Mommy wouldn't stop sobbing in the middle of the night. Luckily, the weird kid never cried about a thing, God bless him. He never made any kind of noise too, but that wasn't so bad.

Two weeks later, the third thing he knew was that the hand he was squeezing inside his hand was too little to survive one more night. It was a two years old hand in a weak two years old body, useless even as a blanket in the cold night if that child died. He tried to imagine the cats feeding on the mute boy, and that didn't feel right. So he was stuffing the kid with apples and water and, well, they were running out of it.

They were dying tonight, but there was no point on thinking of it.

The fourth thing he knew was that there were people after them the last few days. There were shadows that moved, there were sounds that faded, and there was the creepy feeling that they were not alone. Something followed them for days, but just dared coming closer when he was distracted. So that was his third day without sleep.

Mommy always told him not to leave home. Mommy always said bad people would come after him, so she hid him from the world for ten years.  
Mommy was a crazy bitch too, but she had a point about that.

On that same damned day, it was already too late when he heard the steps behind them. That was the first time it really showed up, because he wasn't distracted, he was just _too too tired_. Grabbing the skeletal kid and running, he didn't dare to look back, because whatever was following them was just _too evil_ not to be scared of.  
By the time he managed to hide in an alley, his backpack was gone and so was his breath. They just sit there, the boy breathing weakly on his lap, and waited because, at the same time they were hidden, they were also cornered. The thing that followed them kept coming closer, he could feel it, and _fuck they were gonna die and that wasn't peaceful at all_.

I mean, he was a dumb kid carrying another freaky kid in a dead city and they were just gonna die that day and get eaten by cats anyway, but even if shit couldn't get any better, it didn't mean it was okay if it got worse.

"Name, kiddo. Na-me. Have you got a na-me?"

He would never know why he whispered that. Until fifteen years after that day, he would never feel so close to death either. No one should die without a name.  
But the boy didn't answer, that two-year-old fucker, so the cheesy moment was gone.

The fifth thing he knew was that he didn't die. The sound of steps stopped, and a shooting started. More people arrived, he could hear it, and saved their asses. But he couldn't feel the boy breathing.

He hugged the kid. That wasn't a half hug, that was a real complete hug, with trembling and sobbing and chocking under the sounds of the chaotic battle between whatever was following them and whatever arrived later. He wanted his mommy, he said. The little boy was a ragdoll in his arms, weak, cold and thin.

"Na-me. Mas-rur."

That little fucker had a perfect dramatic timing, jeez.

When the shooting was over, Masrur-boy was fainted in his arms, and he wanted to believe the child wasn't cat food already. He couldn't move, 'cause the kid was heavy, and he wasn't ready to let go of the little body, even if the boy could be dead. He was tired. He was tired to death.  
Mommy said before: there's nowhere else to go. Mommy knew best.

When the adrenaline stopped running through his veins, his mind started spiraling into a strange kind of sleep. He looked at the end of the alley, and the sun was almost gone. Then he tried to look at anything else, and then he could see nothing more. Damn, they didn't even make it to the end of the town.

That's when a pair of hands got him. Warm, strong, bold hands ( _just don't you faint on me now, boy. hold on just a little more, will you_ ). Other pair of hands got Masrur.  
"He comes with a souvenir", someone said.

He managed to open his eyes just a crack, and, looking at him, there was a guy. There was also a fairy.

"We found you, boy. We found you. You're safe now. I'm Rashid. That guy right there is Yunan."

"Welcome to the party, kid ", the fairy said, holding Masrur the way one holds a jacket. "You're ten years late."

The last thing he knew was that, at the end of the alley, Mommy was waving goodbye.

 **Central City – He wouldn't remember what time in the night was that – Ten years before the day Sinbad woke up**

 **REPORT 01-20xx**  
 **ATTENTION: REPORT 01-20xx IS FOR REVIEW BY CLASS-4 PERSONNEL ONLY**  
 **Incident:** 01-20xx  
 **Personnel involved:** Marshal R., Recruit R., Civilians [CONFIDENTIAL], Mobile Task Force Restraint-7 (aka "Project Balbadd")  
 **Date:** [CONFIDENTIAL]  
 **Location:** Silver Woods hill, Central City  
 **Description:** Restraint-7 dispatched after seven civilian reports of "uncommon activity" in the location. Generals [CONFIDENTIAL] temporarily attached to supervise and observe, given the fact that the location corresponds to Ren's family patio. Marshal Koutoku Ren left the quarter and went to the family patio about twelve hours before Restraint-7 dispatch and never answered to General [CONFIDENTIAL] calls.

After getting to the Silver Woods hill, the Soldiers [CONFIDENTIAL] found the gates to the Ren patio open. Near to the main house, Soldiers [CONFIDENTIAL] found civilian population killed. The bodies of civilians Gyokuen Ren (1), Hakuryuu Ren (2) and Hakuren Ren (3) were found close to the main entrance. The bodies of subjects (1) and (3) were found at the stairs with their heads missing. The body of subject (2) was found cut in four pieces with a bladed weapon, and the head was missing. The body of civilian Hakuei Ren (4) was found in the pool. The civilian was apparently left in the water still alive, but the legs were cut off, causing death by drowning and blood loss. The body of civilian Hakuyuu Ren (5) was found in the oven, folded in half, the spine probably broken. The body of Kougyoku Ren (6) was found sit in the couch, as if the civilian was alive, but her guts were in the carpet.

The body of Marshal Koutoku Ren (7) was found at the kids' room on the second floor. The arms and legs were separated from the body. Civilians Koumei Ren (8) and Kouha Ren (9) were found inside the closet, and Recruit Kouen Ren (10) was found in the balcony. The civilians Kouha Ren, 8 years old, and Koumei Ren, 10 years old, and the recruit Kouen Ren, 15 years old, were found incapacitated due to physical trauma.

Civilians Koumei Ren and Kouha Ren and Recruit Kouen Ren were then driven to the Army's medical facility. The civilian Kouha Ren dealt with enormous amounts of damage and the removal of over 50% of the body skin, mostly from arms and legs. The fingers and scalp were also removed. The civilian Koumei Ren dealt with violent beating and strangulation, but stayed lucid. Recruit Kouen Ren had most of the bones of the body broken, and was found in shock state due to pain and blood loss.

The civilian Kouha Ren feel into coma three hours later at the hospital. After that, Recruit Kouen Ren was moved to temporary contention due to agitation.

The civilian Koumei Ren agreed on giving evidence. The civilian was constantly looking back, and gradually becoming more and more agitated as the conversation went on. According to the civilian, he and Recruit Kouen Ren were at the balcony on the second floor when Marshal Koutoku Ren went home.

 _The night Koumei's father died could have been a normal and lame night you wouldn't like to hear about._

 _Truth is Koumei was this really loser kid that enjoyed writing and getting all poetic about life and crappy birds. Every night he would sit his emo ass in the balcony and write rhymes and deep shit in his diary, which you could also call "All the problems a rich dick can have" (at least that's how Kouen used to call it). After that, father would come home from work, everyone would go to the kitchen, and the maid would bring roasted corn and hot slices of red meat for dinner. Maybe there would be strawberries and cream for dessert and father would ask them about studies and trainings. Kouen would tell him about his improvements, and Koumei would blab about absolutely anything until father hold him in his arms so the little boy could finally shut the fuck up. All the family would be awfully loud at the table, and that would be a typical normal lame night._

 _So that night they were at the balcony, and little brother put "flower" and "tower" at the same sentence while Kouen tried to figure out which one was that lonely dumb star in the sky. It was red and blinked, like a diseased eye ("or Kouen's", Koumei wrote that), and rode the sky on time's back. Hours passed slowly that night, glued in the thick warm breeze. At some point, Kouha went there too, and ended up sleeping on Koumei's lap, because_ children _._

 _But that wasn't a typical lame normal night._

 _"_ _What are you writing about?" Kouen had these eyes that screamed and shut a door in your mind. There was an insane golden glow behind them that Koumei used to watch in love and fear, counting down to the explosion._

 _"_ _A nightmare."_

 _"_ _That's new. Tell me" also, big brother was prolix like a wall. From the balcony you could see the woods and, under the moonlight, the trees were a silver mess of wild nothing. The breeze sang a bad ballad between them and Koumei felt sick. Kouha was heavy._

 _"_ _I dreamt you died."_

 _They could hear father's car skidding in the garage for some reason, probably because the old man was getting blind as a fucking bat._

 _"_ _Well, well. Aren't you something?", then Kouen smiled. Koumei remembers all this shit because Kouen unfolded his lips like a dirty napkin that night. The oh-so-serious big prick gave him teeth and joy, and never looked so much like dad._

 _Kouen was fifteen years old and, from above strong arms and crimson hair, gave you the impression that he could drag the world in a collar if he wanted to. When he smiled, it seemed like the world would beg for being dragged by him. Good thing father came home early, Koumei felt like he needed a hug._

 _"_ _Is 'flower' and 'tower' a good rhyme?"_

The civilian says they heard Marshal Koutoku Ren's car skidding at the garage. A few minutes later, the house went silent for some reason, except for a buzz coming from the first floor. The Recruit Kouen Ren did not let the younger brother leave the room, and Koumei Ren says that the Recruit affirmed that "something was wrong". When they heard screams coming from downstairs, the Recruit put both Komei and Kouha Ren in the closet, but they did not have the keys to lock the door of the room.

 _From downstairs they could hear a distant yet awkward buzz. Kouen's teeth hid behinds his mouth, and, when Koumei stood up to greet daddy, big brother didn't let him go (_ wait what the fuck _). Something felt_ so so _wrong that night._

 _That's when something broke and screamed and the screams and the breakings and the buzz came closer and closer and got louder and louder. Quickly big brother took Koumei by the hand and put him and an awaken Kouha in the closet (_ stay quiet can you. oh my god please don't make a sound everything's is gonna be. big brother will take care of you just don't make a sound _), then closed the closet's door and stayed away. But Koumei opened it, just a crack._

 _After the house went silent again, daddy broke in the room._

 _He was a strong and tall man, quite handsome and, from inside the closet, the choking sounds he made and the blood dripping from his throat seemed out of place somehow. Koumei covered Kouha's mouth, not sure about what kind of squeak he should make._

 _"_ _Kouen. Run", daddy said before his left arm got cut off and fell on the floor, almost still moving. Big brother was a frozen contemporary painting when blood sprayed on his face, and didn't move before father's other arm joined the first one on the wooden carpet. After all, "Kouen, run" was the dumbest thing someone could say. It's not like there is somewhere to go in a room._

 _Daddy collapsed, and then they could see the enormous man that held a ridiculous chainsaw (_ a motherfucking chainsaw _) behind father's body. Koumei thought about crying, but honestly it's not like he had ever prepared himself to cry before a crazy dude with a chainsaw. So he just got puzzled while the man stared at Kouen the way one sets fire to ants._

 _"_ _Found ya, Chance, right?" The man was a mixture of too many things going on in a huge body, and the way he moved made his muscles look like they were all in the wrong places. "Marshall Ren almost did it, right?" Father sounded like a chick when the man started cutting off his legs. Oh god they wished he was dead when the chainsaw fought with his femurs, "but traitors use to have short legs, right?"_

 _"_ _Who are you?" covered in blood, Kouen sounded like the breeze in the trees. Then Koumei threw up in his hands._

 _"_ _I came to take you to Al-Thamen, right? That's where Chances belong to, right?"_

 _Maybe that was nothing. Maybe that was just a regular problem a rich dick could have._

The civilian says that the house was invaded by a stranger with a chainsaw. He did not see how the other civilians were killed, but it was fast, and he assumes that the stranger did that alone. After the man killed Marshal Koutoku Ren, Recruit Kouen managed to get the information that the man was from Al-Thamen and was in charge of taking the Recruit to the organization.

From this point, the civilian showed signs of trauma and pain, and the information provided got confused. He says that the civilian Kouha Ren started crying and the stranger tried to reach the closet, so the Recruit tried to stop him. That's when the man broke the Recruit's bones so he would not move.

The civilian says the stranger opened the closet and took the younger kid to "have some fun". The civilian Koumei Ren got violently beaten up and strangled when he tried to stop the man, and fainted for hours. When he woke up, Kouha Ren was being tortured in front of the Recruit.

When asked about why the stranger did not kill them or take the Recruit away, the civilian laughed. He says the man was killed by someone else, and the body was taken away. He was confuse and could not provide a name or a description, but he knows the man whispered something to the Recruit Kouen Ren.

The civilian became delirious and had to be taken back to the medical facility. The last thing he said is that he saw something that looked like the moonlight.

 _Notes: I am telling you, we have to cut relations with Al-Thamen! That's for sure their_ modus operandi _and they broke our pact. They said they would leave the Chance Kouen Ren to the Army and the Ren family, but it seems like they have changed their minds. They cannot be trusted anymore. They killed a Marshal. What are we gonna do?_

To be continued.


End file.
